Subscribe to our Telegram channel
Elon Musk instructed programmers to increase the priority of their Twitter posts by 1000 times
Twitter employees said that the company’s engineers have created a system that brings Elon Musk’s tweets to the top of recommendations. This was reported by Platformer, which anonymously spoke to the developers.
According to employees, on February 13 at 2:36 am, Elon Musk’s brother James sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers. «We're debugging a user engagement issue across the platform,» Musk wrote in a Slack chat. When the surprised developers got to work, the problem became more specific: Elon’s tweet about the Super Bowl received less audience engagement than Joe Biden’s.
The US president’s post, in which he stated that he would support the Philadelphia Eagles, received almost 29 million views. Musk’s tweet, which also expressed his support for the FC, garnered just over 9.1 million views. Then Musk deleted the tweet, as media speculate, because he was disappointed with the statistics.
Within a day, almost all Twitter users felt the consequences of Musk’s insult — the billionaire’s posts overwhelmed the feed. Platformer assured that after Musk threatened to fire the rest of his engineers, they created a system designed to ensure that Musk — and only he — would benefit the most from promoting tweets to the entire Twitter user base.
In recent weeks, Musk’s particular obsession with the performance of his own posts has been noted. Last week, he fired one of Twitter’s two chief engineers after he said that interest in Musk among the social network’s audience was waning.
It turned out that many people blocked or turned off notifications from the Twitter CEO. So the engineers created a code that increased the priority of the billionaire’s tweets by 1000 times. As a result, more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9 million followers see his tweets first in the feed. This also applies to those users who do not follow him.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
As a reminder, Musk recently revealed when he might step down as the head of the company. The billionaire is still trying to find a successor to lead Twitter before the end of 2023.